Kidney from colleague is lawyer's 'biggest gift' this Christmas

A North Carolina lawyer who wanted to check her compatibility for donating a kidney to her husband learned she wasn’t a match, but that didn’t stop her from donating one of her kidneys.

Carrie Vickery of the Holton Law Firm donated her kidney last Tuesday to another lawyer, Winston-Salem Deputy City Attorney Al Andrews, MyFox8.com reports. They spoke with the Winston-Salem Chronicle before the surgery.

Vickery had taken a test for compatibility because her husband was born with only one kidney, and she was interested in becoming a donor if he ever needed a second kidney, the stories say. Vickery learned about Andrews’ plight over lunch after he invited her to join a museum committee, but she missed a meeting because her grandmother was dying from kidney failure.

Vickery recalled the lunch in an interview with the Chronicle. “He starts telling me about how he’s been sick and has been on the transplant list and on dialysis,” she said. “I said, ‘Oh you need a kidney?’ and he was like, ‘Yeah,’ and I was like, ‘Oh, do you want mine?’ ”

Vickery said she would donate, if possible, if she wasn’t a match for her husband—it turned out she wasn’t. She was a match for Andrews. “It’s Christmas,” Andrews told MyFox8, “and I’ve got the biggest gift under the tree.”

Both Vickery and Andrews attribute the conversation to more than just luck, the Chronicle says. “The timing was so perfect,” Vickery said, “that you know that it’s nothing else but a spiritual intervention of some sort that made this happen.”